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FiTZHUGH BiRNEY 



A MEMOIR. 



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C A M B R I ]J G E . 

1866. 






University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 






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THE flag is folded ; for the battlers d'ln^ 
The cry of triunpet^ and the hla-ze of gun^ 
The thunderous rush of squadrons closing in^ 
The stifled groan, the triu/nph shout, are done. 
And Peace is come, ivith passionless, mild eyes, 
A rnofher s eyes, a mother s tenderness. 
Cahned by her touch the iveary nation lies. 
And feels her deiuy breath upon his face. 
But Time cannot avail, with all his years. 
Some chas?ns in our riven hearts to fill, 
JVhence misty memories rise to break in tears. 
And ghosts of buried hopes that haunt us still, 
Tet bring a kind of joy, — the solemn trust 
That form is more than unsubstantial dust. 



IF generous parentage or breeding h'lgh^ 

Or that fine strain where love and ivit^ at one^ 

Put sisterly each other' s jeiuels on^ 

Or flawless truth^ or spotless purity^ 

Or beauty^ were an ar?nor against Fate ; 

Then thou^ bright blended grace of man and boy^ 

Szveet jnemory ! zvouldst walk^ a present joy^ 

With us^ the sunny slope of life^ elate ! 

Dear^ blood-bought laruf how precious for the cost ! 

Fair triionph^ perfected by private pain ! 

Bright 7na?ihood tried and proved beyond compare I 

War luins an au'ful glory fro?n that lost 

Nobility^ which was not young in vain ; 

But Peace tiuines cypress in her golden hair. 



FITZHUGH BIRNEY. 

T^ITZHUGH BIRNEY was the 
youngest son of James G. Birney, 
the distinguished Kentuckian, who, 
born and bred a slaveholder, emanci- 
pated his slaves in 1835, and, in the 
distribution of his father's estate, took 
the negroes for his portion, that he 
might set them also free. When a 
young man he had been Attorney- 
General of Alabama. His talents, 
virtue, and sacrifices made him the 
candidate of the Liberty Party for the 
Presidency, in 1844. 

By a first marriage with a relative of 



lO 



General McDowell, Mr. Birney had 
rive sons and one daughter. In 1841, 
he married Elizabeth P. Fitzhugh, a 
daughter of the New York branch of 
an old Maryland family. Fitzhugh 
Birney was born at Saginaw, Michigan, 
January 9, 1842. The following April 
his parents removed to Bay City, near 
the mouth of the sluggish Saginaw 
River. 

In 1842, the site of the town had 
been cleared of pine forests ; but the 
only buildings yet erected were the 
warehouse, the hotel, and the bank. 
In the hotel Mr. Birney and his family 
temporarily lodged. In the bank he 
had an office and a Sunday school. 
The settlement was much visited by 
the Ojibway Indians, with whom the 
boy became a favorite. The first words 



1 1 

he learned to speak were in the Indian 
tongue. 

Fitzhugh was an athletic and adven- 
turous child. He could not remember 
when he began to swim. Once, before 
he was five years old, having pushed 
out on the river in a sail-boat with two 
little companions, he was discovered at 
the helm, assuring them that there was 
no danger, and promising to take them 
ashore if they w^ould " stop crying." 
At seven, he skated alone by moonlight 
from Saginaw to Bay City, a distance of 
twelve miles. 

At four he had learned to read well. 
From five to eight he was taught by an 
excellent New England teacher. Miss 
Berry of Belfast, Maine. In September, 
1 85 1, he was placed in Theodore D. 
Weld's family school at Belleville, New 



12 



Jersey, where he remained until, in 
1854, Mr. Weld removed to Eagles- 
wood, Perth Amboy. Hither Mr. 
Birney came, and here he lived until 
his death in the fall of 1857. During 
these invalid years Fitzhugh was a 
nurse to him, as tender and gentle as 
a girl. 

Fitzhugh Birney was a thorough and 
ambitious student. He unconsciously 
exerted over his mates a powerful per- 
sonal influence, which they were glad 
to feel and acknowledge. If others 
rivalled him in some feats of the play- 
ground and gymnasium, none excelled 
in so many, none threw over all sports 
such a fascination as he. In his seven- 
teenth year he had the happiness to 
save the life of a school-girl too ad- 
venturous in learning to swim. She 



13 

had sunk once ; the tide was running 
rapidly to the sea. Without taking off 
hat, coat, or shoes, Fitzhugh, who had 
watched her from the pier, plunged 
in, seized her as she rose, and sup- 
ported her till help came. 

Among his companions at this school 
was one afterwards known as General 
Llewellyn F. Haskell, whose rapid pro- 
motion was the reward of equal tal- 
ent, valor, and good fortune. Another 
was that brave Quaker, Captain Hal- 
lock Mann, whose gallant rescue of 
General Kilpatrick at Aldie Gap, Vir- 
ginia, was one of the memorable deeds 
of the war. Kilpatrick was in the 
hands of the enemy. Mann, seeing his 
men hesitate, shouted, ** Are you heroes 
or cowards ? Follow me ! Charge ! " 
and, without looking back, dashed into 



the mellay. His troop, fired by the 
example, ralUed, dispersed the Confed- 
erates, and carried him, severely wound- 
ed, with the General, from the field. 
Captain Mann was killed in a subse- 
quent battle. 

In the spring of 1859, a wrestling- 
match with his young friend Mann 
brought on bleeding at the lungs, 
which obliged Fitzhugh to abandon his 
purpose of entering college that year. 
The following July he sailed for Eu- 
rope, arriving there shortly after the 
peace of Villafranca, The Continent 
was in a ferment ; and he was suffi- 
ciently well informed to take an excit- 
ed interest in the questions of the time. 
From a balcony on the Boulevard, 
looking down the Rue de la Paix, he 
saw the triumphal entry into Paris of 



^5 

the Emperor and the army of Italy, 
" I suppose war is a great evil," he 
said, " but it is so splendid that I am 
half sorry we can never have one at 
home." 

A week later he was in Chamouni. 
On the Mer de Glace, his party came 
to a place where two large masses of 
ice, sloping towards each other, left be- 
tween them a dangerous crevasse. An 
Englishman, named Haskin, went from 
the upper edge of one of these inclined 
planes, intending to cross it obliquely 
and join his friends on an ice-mound 
at the end of the opening. He was 
beginning to slide helplessly towards 
destruction, when Fitzhugh ran upon 
him from the elevation with an impetus 
sufficient to carry both along the edge 
of the abyss to a place of safety beyond 



i6 

it. Of course the story was told in 
Chamouni. Prince Humbert of Italy, 
a youth of about the same age, then 
visiting the Valley, sent an aid with his 
compliments ; and during his stay Fitz- 
hugh was annoyed by the curiosity of 
travellers. 

He was in Berlin at the time of 
John Brown's attack on Harper's Fer- 
ry, He was fascinated by the gener- 
osity of the deed, but shocked by the 
fatal miscalculation which seemed al- 
most to clothe it with the attributes 
of crime. " You condemn, then, the 
enterprise, my son," said the American 
Minister to him, " while you justify 
John Brown." In the third year of 
the war he wrote, *' I have passed over 
the scene of John Brown's adventurous 
raid. He was our leader, after all. 



17 

We shall finish his work, and that 
' perturbed spirit ' may rest in peace." 

He remained at Berlin three months, 
studying German and music. His 
health seemed re-established ; he was 
the best skater on the ponds of the 
Thiergarten. Once, after he had per- 
formed an evolution of peculiar grace 
and dexterity, the crown-princess, Vic- 
toria of Prussia, witnessing the sport 
from her carriage, gave with her own 
hands the signal of applause. He was 
at Rome during the Carnival ; in Paris, 
at Easter. He landed at Boston in 
July, i860, and a few days afterwards 
entered Harvard College without con- 
ditions. 

Few allusions to public affairs occur 
in his letters from Cambridge during 
the first term. Two days after the at- 
3 



i8 

tack on Fort Sumter, he wrote : *' If 
the South is in earnest, I shall be in 
the fight." But he was ill, — "tired 
of being sick every spring with a cold." 
His letters to his mother are now de- 
voted, by almost alternate sentences, to 
his health and the war. 

" A very little study affects my head. 
Boston is splendidly excited. What a 
horrible war, — fathers against sons, 
brothers against brothers ! Yet the 
grass in the College yard is green, and 
the buds are coming out." 

April 20. " We have ninety signa- 
tures to a petition to the Faculty for a 
drill-club in our Class. If the Faculty 
refuse, we shall appeal to the Gov- 
ernor ! 

April 26. " Thank you for the 
Union badge and the violets. All the 



19 

students may belong to the Club by 
getting permission of their parents, and 
signing an agreement to obey all the 
rules. My cough hangs on as coughs 
will." 

April 28. " Last evening Governor 
Andrew sent a message to President 
Felton, that, having no company ready 
to guard the Arsenal here, he wished 
the students to take charge of it. The 
boating fever has abated ; everything is 
fight now. Yesterday was the anniver- 
sary of the day when Washington first 
drew his sword as commander of the 
American Army. An immense war 
meeting was held under the Wash- 
ington elm. Governor Banks spoke ; 
a band played ; a regiment which goes 
off Tuesday paraded. I shall probably 
pay you a short visit — till I am bet- 
ter. 



20 



He was quite feeble during the most 
of the summer, but in August grew 
rapidly stronger. On the 17th of Au- 
gust, at the house of his uncle, Gerrit 
Smith, in Peterborough, New York, he. 
received a letter from his brother Da- 
vid, who said, " I am now colonel of 
the regiment called ' Birney's Zouaves.' 
If you can get your mother's permis- 
sion, you may go with me as lieuten- 
ant." On the envelope is written in 
pencil, " Would you give me leave to 
go, if I were intent on it?" "Yes," 
is the answer in his mother's hand, " it 
you were well." 

At the end of i\.ugust, Fitzhugh, 
now a Sophomore, rejoined his Class. 
October 27th, he wrote : " I have 
the war-fever au:ain. That liQ-ht at 
Edward's Ferry ! — in it six from Har- 



21 

vard that I knew, or knew of, were 
wounded or taken prisoners. And I 
am not strong ! I might get along in a 
cavalry regiment. The riding would 
do me good. What if I did not get 
along ? I should have done what I 
could." 

To another : " I must go to the 
war. My father sacrificed all for free- 
dom. My brothers are already in the 
field. Am I not dishonoring my name 
and the cause with which it is identi- 
fied ? " 

These reflections weighed on his 
spirits. His physician shut up his 
books, recommending some active out- 
door employment. November 28th, 
he wrote from Camp Graham, near 
Washington : *' I am now First Lieu- 
tenant, Company A, Twenty-third 



22 

Pennsylvania Volunteers, Colonel Da- 
vid B. Birney." 

He was soon detached from the regi- 
ment for signal duty. "On the battle- 
field," he wrote, *'our position is dan- 
gerous. But the greater the danger, the 
better the service." He acted on the 
signal corps seven months, and was 
considered "one of its three most able 
and accurate officers." 

A friend once found him on the 
Chickahominy, with two attendants, 
far from any Union force. In this 
position, very dangerous, but favorable 
for watching the enemy's movements, 
he had been several days. A hostile 
scouting party might have come upon 
him at any time ; but the advantages, 
he thought, overbalanced the risk, and 
he stayed. 



23 

In February he had an attack of 
cough and fever, during which he 
wrote : "I do not like to think of the 
country. Its situation saddens me. 
The war is the price of slavery. I 
hope it will prove to be the price of 
liberty." 

He returned to duty towards the 
middle of March, but shortly fell sick 
again, and was nursed by his mother 
till near the end of April. On the 
1 2th of May he was "on the steam- 
er City of Richmond, at Yorktown, 
bound for West Point" (Virginia) "and 
General McClellan." On the 21st of 
May he wrote : " Eight miles from 
Richmond ! in shirt-sleeves, trying to 
catch the breeze ; tanned quite brown ; 
not now the pale, thin, sick boy you 
nursed so tenderly. General Stoneman 



24 

and I have seen Richmond from the 
balloon." May 23d: "To-day, at the 
crossing of the Chickahominy, at last 
I was under lire, and do not think I 
showed fear." 

In the midst of the seven days' bat- 
tle at Richmond, Lieutenant Birney 
found time to write to his mother : 
*' The nearest shot to me passed under 
my arm, cutting the body and sleeve of 
my coat and shirt. I was in the hot- 
test of the lire at Mechanicsville. The 
light is still going on. If anything 
happens to me, let it console you that I 
am doing my duty in a just cause. 
You will not be the only sad one." 
General William Birney gives a picture 
of him in this battle : " In the after- 
noon of the disastrous affair of Gaines's 
Hill, as my regiment was marching 



25 

into the fight, I met Fitzhugh. ' Ah, 
brother Will,' he cried, * we have the 
Rebels this time ! ' * What makes you 
think so ? ' said I ; ' it looks the other 
way to me.' ' They say so at head- 
quarters,' he answered, ' and I know 
they are in high spirits about it. They 
say we shall bag at least ten thousand.' 
In a few hours the Rebels had bagged 
many of us, myself among the num- 
ber." 

Colonel David B. Birney having 
become Brigadier-General, Lieutenant 
Birney wrote, " I hope soon to be 
brother's Aid." August i, 1862, he 
was commissioned as '* Assistant Adju- 
tant-General of the Second Brigade, of 
Kearney's division, with the rank of 
Captain." He added to the duties of 
this position those of Aid in the field. 
4 



26 

** His delivery of orders under lire was 
clear, concise, and correct." 

In the second battle of Bull Run, 
Captain Birney's collar-bone was bro- 
ken by the falling of his horse. This 
was the only hurt he received in two 
years and a half of dangerous service, 
during which he participated in more 
than twenty engagements. 

After the battle of Fredericksburg 
he wrote : " You at home must suffer 
more from anxiety than we do from 
cold, exposure, and battle. It was hard 
for you to know that so fierce a fight 
was raging, and that we three were in 
the hottest of it. You ask me how I 
felt. There is intense excitement as 
the tide of battle ebbs and flows. If 
one's own party are advancing, there is 
a glow of exultation ; if retreating, a 



27 

passion to turn the enemy back. 'T was 
so the other day when Meade's Penn- 
sylvania Reserves, to which we were 
support, advanced in a long, magnifi- 
cent line of battle, as if on parade. All 
was quiet when they started, but in an 
instant the roar ot cannon and the 
rattle ot musketry were deafening. 
Twenty minutes it lasted. Then from 
the woods directly in front of us came 
out a shattered mass of troops in per- 
fect disorder. It seems to me that I 
could have died a hundred deaths to 
turn the scale One ot our colo- 
nels well describes our position that 
day, — ' The Rebels were in the boxes 
and we in the pit.' It was a Roman 
amphitheatre, and we were the poor 
beasts exposed on the arena." 

April 28, 1863. '' We expect a 



28 

great battle all around Fredericksburg. 
Should I fall, remember the cause I 
am fighting for and forget your grief 
in consoling others. God will protect 
me. Your beautiful dowers will be in 
my pocket." 

May 5. " In the field, Chancellors- 
ville. I am safe. My horse Prince was 
shot in the leg. He threw me off, van- 
ished in the war-cloud, and I have not 
seen him since. 

" So you wondered what the same 
moon shone on that night by the Rap- 
pahannock. On the Third Army Corps, 
cut off from the rest of the army, 
massed on the field, its lines of battle 
facing both ways, to the front and to 
the rear ; pickets all around us, for we 
knew not whence the attack might 
come; our brigade Iving behind the 



29 

batteries as support in case ot attack ; 
the other two brigades moving silently 
forwards into the black woods. A 
stillness like that of the grave ! Sud- 
denly a crash of musketry all along the 
line, and the iierce opening of can- 
non ! This was half an hour before 
midnight. In fifteen minutes all was 
over, and the bright, beautiful moon 
shone on the piles ot the dead and 
dying." 

May 14. " Although the General is 
my brother, I must praise him. He 
is cool, kind, and firm. Good soldiers 
like him ; but the shirks complain. 
You know what a splendid horseman 
he is. I have tried to do my duty for 
his sake. Saturday night, after we had 
made the night attack in which Stone- 
wall Jackson was killed and Kearney 



30 

avenged, he had no blankets. I got 
him one, and we lay down together 
and slept. It was pleasant for us both 
to be there unharmed. The next day 
I was sitting by his side on horseback, 
when a shell exploded close to us. A 
piece passing under my arm struck him 
a severe blow on the belt." 

July 5th, he wrote from Gettys- 
burg : " Yesterday our band played 
the national airs amid the shouts of a 
victorious army." 

The promotion of his brother David 
to the rank of Major-General was fol- 
lowed by the promotion of Captain 
Birney. His commission as Assistant 
Adjutant-General, with the rank of 
Major, is dated September 15, 1863. 

November 30th, he sent a pencilled 
note from Mine Run : " We assault the 



31 

enemy's works at eight, a. m. We are 
to charge up an open slope halt a mile 
long." December 3d : " Back at 
Brandy Station. No defeat, but dis- 
graceful failure." 

On Christmas-day, 1863, Major Bir- 
ney married Laura, youngest daughter 
of the late Jacob Strattan, of Philadel- 
phia, — a lady with whom he became 
acquainted when both were pupils at 
Eagleswood. It is harder for him 
" now to be away from home than it 
ever has been before," but he will 
" stay till the good work is done." 

In April he says : — *' Since my 
marriage life seems to me doubly pre- 
cious and doubly uncertain. I need 
more than ever true Christian resigna- 
tion to bear with composure whatever 
lot. I glory in being the soldier of a 



32 

noble cause. If it is God's will that I 
fall, — well, I do not complain." 

From Chancellorsville, May 4th, he 
writes : ** With what humiliation we 
left this place a year ago to-day ! The 
graves are very many. Violets do 
what they can to cheer the desola- 
tion. 

Through the spring of 1864 he suf- 
fered from cold and cough ; towards 
the end of May it became evident that 
he was breaking down. The Gener- 
al's confidence in him invited constant 
over-exertion ; and he was too sensitive 
to accept the profi"ered assistance of his 
friends. He positively refused to go on 
the sick-list, " when so many able- 
bodied men were shirking their duty." 
He " determined to stay with the old 
red diamond " (the division badge) 



33 

*' till it reached Richmond, or die on 
the road." The last two days of May 
he suffered severely from want of sleep, 
coughing violently whenever he lay 
down. Unwillingly he allowed his 
tent-mate to hold him in his arms that 
he might rest. All this time, studi- 
ously concealing his condition as far as 
possible, he performed his official la- 
bors. June 2d, he wrote to his wife : 
** I shall, perhaps, have to give up duty 
for a day or two. Nothing but a spas- 
modic cough." It was pneumonia, 
yune 5th he wrote, on board the 
steamer : " Here I am on my way to 
you, — not wounded. I shall rest a day 
in Washington, at Duddington." (Dud- 
dington is the old Carroll mansion, 
still inhabited by members of the Car- 
roll family, cousins of Major Birney's 
5 



Lore, 



34 

mother.) He reached Duddington on 
the 6th of June. Though very sick 
and travel-worn, he wrote with his 
own hand the telegraphic messages that 
summoned his wife and mother to his 
side. He bore his physical sufferings 
\vith cheerfulness and patience, and 
looked forward with resignation to the 
end ; but he showed a soldier's sensi- 
tiveness at dying of disease. The day 
he died, he said to a wounded cousin, 
'* I wish I had that bullet through 
my body." Once he asked, musingly, 
'* Who will care for mother now '? " 
An hour after his death came the invi- 
tation to attend the exercises of his 
Class-Day at Cambridge. It was the 
17th of June, 1864, — the anniversary 
of the battle of Bunker's Hill. 

Fitzhugh Birney was an uncommonly 



handsome man, tall, athletic, and ap- 
parently robust, but unable to endure 
long-continued hardship and exposure. 
He was an excellent horseman and a 
passionate hunter. He never got lost ; 
his knowledge of place was instinctive 
and unerring, like an Indian's. Cour- 
age, truthfulness, and generosity, which 
distinguished his boyhood, were yet 
more conspicuous ornaments of his 
brief manhood. He was always help- 
ing others ; but others rarely found it 
possible to help him. The gentleness 
of his manners veiled from most observ- 
ers the singular decision of his charac- 
ter. He was little influenced by the 
opinions of others ; but, having formed 
his own, he adhered to them without 
obtrusion or argument. Genial in 
temper, fond ot society and mirth, he 



36 

maintained strictly temperate habits. 
When the circle of his friends was hi- 
larious with wine and revel, this boy 
with the beardless chin and the steady, 
brown eyes, the gayest of the com- 
pany, was never flushed. Genuine self- 
respect and principles deeply implanted 
kept him pure amid the extraordinary 
temptations to which his beauty, kind- 
ness, and universal popularity exposed 
him. Of one thus richly endowed with 
bright faculties and instinctive virtues, 
which were still further recommended 
by the charm of tine demeanor, the 
impartial judgment becomes sponta- 
neous praise. 

He was buried by his father's side 
at Hampton, the old homestead of the 
Fitzhughs, near Geneseo, Livingston 
County, New York. A posthumous 



37 

daughter, born in November, bears his 
name. 

Of the five sons of James G. Birney 
living at the outbreak of the war, four 
entered the Union Army, of whom 
three died in the service. Noblesse 
oblige. 

Major-General David B. Birney had 
been Lieutenant-Colonel in the Phil- 
adelphia volunteer militia before the 
war, and in that capacity accompanied 
his regiment into the held. In the fall 
of 1 86 1, he raised the Twenty-third 
Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers, 
known as " Birney 's Zouaves." He 
long commanded the famous Kearney's 
division of the Third Corps. For dis- 
tinguished services he was promoted to 
the command of the Tenth Corps, won 
an important battle on the 7th of Oc- 



38 

tober, 1864, and died eleven days after, 
in Philadelphia. 

Brigadier-General William Birney, at 
the beginning of the war, was residing 
at Perth iVmboy, New Jersey. He 
abandoned a prosperous law practice in 
New York City, and entered the ser- 
vice as Captain in a New Jersey regi- 
ment. He was with the Army of the 
Potomac in all its early battles, rose to 
the rank of Colonel, and, as superin- 
tendent of the organization of colored 
troops in Maryland and at Washington, 
sent seven thousand into the field. He 
was made Brigadier-General in 1863, 
commanded in Florida after the disas- 
trous battle of Olustee, recovered all 
the territory lost by that battle, and 
was promoted to the command of the 
Third Division, Tenth Corps, in Au- 



39 

gust, 1864. This division, afterwards 
known as the Third Division ot the 
Twenty -fifth Corps, he commanded 
until the surrender of Lee. 

Lieutenant Dion Birney, a practising 
physician in Bay County, Michigan, 
was commissioned as First Lieutenant 
in the Twenty-third Pennsylvania Vol- 
unteers. He served during the winter 
of 1 861, and through the most of the 
Peninsular campaign of 1862. Owing 
to impaired health, he was obliged to 
leave the army ; and he died soon af- 
terwards in Cincinnati. 

Hon. James Birney, the eldest son of 
James G. Birney, was, at the beginning 
of the war, a Circuit Judge in Mich- 
igan. His son, James G. Birney, en- 
listed as private, and rose to the rank 
of Captain. 



40 

By his father, Major Fitzhugh Bir- 
ney was first-cousin of the Confederate 
General Humphrey Marshall ; by his 
mother, a more distant relative of the 
Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee. 



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